Weather, the Gifts from the Skies

I am a big enthusiast of weather, especially in its extreme forms.

This doesn't mean that I look at the Weather Channel every day, though I do check the forecasts on the Internet whenever I turn on my computer, and sometimes several times a day. And when news of something serious is predicted to come this way, I feel exactly the same anticipatory excitement that I would, say, at buying a new car. With exceptions such as the two "Open Water" films, a good movie on the dish doesn't hold as much drama as a screen on the Weather Channel showing four or five hurricanes lined up in a row and marching inexorably one after the other across the ocean from right to left, from Africa to the Caribbean.

I'm also still well aware that many people immediately south of here and extending into South America are instead filled with dread -- though possibly also with a related kind of excitement -- not knowing whether the luck of the wind shear or whatever will turn their usually idyllic vacation spots into scenes of whirling water, debris, and widespread destruction and even deaths.

So wouldn't you know it.

In all this time I've never been in the "right" spots at the right times to experience such events. Like the many who can say the same thing, I can wonder. Is it just me? Have I been blessed or what?

Of course, by having never lived farther from the Atlantic than about 250 miles, I've been brushed by numerous hurricanes, but none enough to bring me any physical or material damage, or even inconvenience. A couple of days of heavy rain and that's always been about it. No floods or anything on my street or road.

--Except that once when the Air Force stationed me on Okinawa, being new to things I underestimated one typhoon's force and didn't sufficiently seal up the edges of the heavy steel shutter that covered my barracks window, and the water driven in horizontally by the terrific winds completely soaked my cot. But having to sleep on a soaked bed didn't bother me much, as I was at that age, in my early 20's, when young men easily endure such indignities and worse, up to and including submitting to having their lives thrown away to absolutely no purpose, in those mass displays of human idiocy, cruelty, and indifference called wars.

I've been moaning the lack of recognizable snows that have come this way in recent years, and until this morning this winter had been no exception. But three hours ago one started falling, and now there are more than two inches accumulated, with a little more snow and then sleet and freezing rain predicted, into the night.

That should do good things for the ground and for the trees and the shrubs and all the other entities around here that depend on the atmosphere bestowing enough water, including my well. The skies have been a little light on that kind of thing lately. So I'm glad and thankful.